Zhongnan Mountain Forest Park

This guide to Zhongnan Mountain Forest Park in Xi'an follows the Tang poet Wang Wei, who bought a run-down estate here in 740 and, with his friend Pei Di, walked the river cutting through the valley, stopping at twenty exact spots to write short poems that became the Wang River Collection. You'll hear how a Song-dynasty writer later praised the collaboration between his poetry and his painting, and about the copy of Wang Wei's lost scroll made in 1711 by an artist who never saw these hills and had only the poems to guide his brush. It also traces how Wang Wei, mourning his mother here for three years, drifted toward Chan Buddhism until locals began calling him the Poet Buddha. Listen for the river bend and pine slope that still frame the same view his poems once described.